Quacktacular » Websites

My 1&1 Review

Brendan — Sat, 01 May 2010 17:02:49 +0000

A couple weeks ago I wrote about my experiences with 1&1 Internet at length, but decided not to post the article as it came off more like a rant. Instead I think it suffices to say that 1&1 is not a respectable company. In my opinion they do not deserve your business, and should not be trusted with any sensitive services. They might not be there to help you when you need it the most.

My latest issue with them resulted in more than a week of technical issues and wasted time. It was only resolved when I moved my domain to a different company. I was further irritated when they billed me for the domain, that had been transferred to another company a month earlier, and forced me to fill in a form and fax it across the continent to be reimbursed.

A word of advice for 1&1 customers trying to setup or change GLUE (nameserver IPs) for their domain. After making changes to your subdomains ns1 and ns2.yourdomain.com, you must go into the settings for yourdomain.com and click “update” to start the update process. Otherwise nothing will happen and your GLUE will not be updated, and sometimes even this doesn’t work. Best of luck.

Site Redesign

Brendan — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 06:50:02 +0000

You may have noticed some changes to the layout of Quacktacular. I’m in the process of redesigning the site, and to keep the downloads and posts available I decided to leave it open. Take a look at the progress and tell me what you think.

Inter-A on WordPress

Brendan — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 16:37:52 +0000

I finally moved the Inter-A website over to WordPress. There were a number of advantages to the move which I’ll outline below.

Painless adding and editing of content.
Multiuser editing (students, teachers)
Easy plugins for extended functionality
Save draft content for review
Great SEO
Administration time cut in half

On top of the switch to WordPress, I also updated the theme of the site. Its a more minimalist and elegant. I also decided to bring the resolution back down 800px width. In a world with such disparity in resolution, its best practice just to keep as many people as happy as possible. In this case that meant supporting 800x600ers who were complaining about the change ever since I made it. I tried the experiment, my audience just isn’t ready for it yet.

So far I’m very happy with the move. We’ll see how it goes and wether or not its easy enough for technically challenged students and faculty to deal with.